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General Motors Media Press Release

FOR RELEASE:  June 14, 2001
CONTACT(S):  Wally Reese  wareese@earthlink.net

Cadillac And Corvette Look Confidently Forward To 69th LeMans 24 Hours

LE MANS - DAMS Team Cadillac and Corvette Racing finished two days of setting up and qualifying for the 69th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans feeling confident and looking forward to Saturday afternoon’s 4 o’clock start.

“We’re really happy that the pieces have come together,” said Jeff Kettman, Cadillac Program Manager. “Our team worked through its plan and was able to get a clean set of qualifiers on with Emmanuel Collard in car #5, which ran a 3m37s4.

“Car #6 never put qualifying tires on, but continued to work on race setup and turned just under a 3m42s, which is a pretty good race pace. The feedback from the drivers is that the car feels good and that they’re comfortable with it. We’re able now to check some of the configurations on fuel load, so we know how the car will potentially feel at different stages of the race. Tomorrow, we install the race engine and transmission; Saturday morning, we’ll make sure everything functions okay, then it’s Green Flag at four.

“For the LMPs, qualifying position is not important – it’s how you finish the race,” Kettman continued. “We always knew we’d be in the top 15. What’s important for any team is making sure all of the drivers qualify by getting in the required number of laps, day and night, at speed. Because we’re in the LMP class, we don’t have to worry about starting way in the back and working our way up through the field. Over 24 hours, there are a lot of other factors that come into play besides how fast you can qualify your car. Qualifying is more bragging rights.”

Over at Corvette Racing, technicians and drivers are as confident as their Cadillac brethren: “Qualifying today was much better than yesterday,” said Corvette #64 driver Andy Pilgrim. “We worked on and fixed the electrical problem that cost us time yesterday, and the car seems to be running good right now. I didn’t get a clean lap to do a really good qualifying run, so I think I could have done a bit better… maybe a low 56. Unfortunately, the one lap on qualifying tires, which was better than we did last year, was in traffic and ended up a 57. I’m happy with that, I mean it is 24-hour race, and we needed to concentrate on set-up anyway. So we really only tried just the one qualifying run. I’d say we’re pretty happy to be where we are right now.“

Corvette #63 driver Ron Fellows paid tribute to his technicians for turning the car, which had been damaged in the second half of yesterday’s session, around so quickly: “The car is fine, and the guys did a great job of putting it back to where it was before the incident last night. We made one change in terms of the chassis that we hoped would be a major step forward, but it doesn’t seem to get as much grip as before. I suspect that we will go back to the set-up we had before and that will be good enough for the race.”

FINAL QUALIFYING TIMES AT 0.00pm

Related Forum:  Corvette Racing